Frontman Mike Muir told Songfacts:

Not to use the Shrek onion layer analogy, but there’s a lot of different levels to it. For one, it was stuff that had happened specifically to a couple of friends of mine. And then at the time there were a lot of those – I don’t know what they call them – those boot camp things where parents would get their kids taken at 4 in the morning and send them off to these camps in Arizona or Idaho or wherever. The way I look at it and what I thought was, here are people that were parents for 14 or 15 years, they can’t brag about their kids at a party so there must be something wrong with the kid. Then they send them off and stuff. They used to have commercials: “Does your kid get angry when things don’t go their way? Do they do this and that? If you answer yes to three or more of these, they might have a drug or alcohol problem. And you’re not alone, we can help.” And I’m sitting there going, Dude, I’ve never done drugs, I don’t drink, and yeah, I get angry when things don’t go my way. It’s called being human. I’m not a machine. I think it made an easy scapegoat for kids to be the problem. I think a lot of times it was lack of parental skills and time. It happens and it’s a timeless thing, there will always be that generational gap, so to speak.